BOOKS
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If
Mr. Jones plans to persist with such talk, and he really wants
to pursue his lay sociology and psychology, he should be more careful
about the tone of some of his descriptions. I am not recommending that
he follow the model of those heartless social scientists whose work so
often panders to those who want abstractions about people rather than
the truth of their actual lives. But the sociologists, the psychologists
and anthropologists whom he so much admires have a serious job to
do, gathering information about people and their societies and trying
to make sense out of it. Their concern must be strong, their values
real, their work passionate, but none of these to the detriment of
their curiosity and good sense as observers. They may not like what
they see, but surely they cannot confuse their hopes with their study.
At times one finds in this book less concern with information than
polemical writing disguised in the latest jargon of the social sciences.
And often this jargon is not even used to communicate or describe,
but to condemn.
The book is most effective in its simple, direct information about
blues music and its people, and its willingness to relate the suffering
of generations of Negroes to the tenaciously redemptive power of their
music. What was one kind of Hell, the author says, now turns into
another as Negroes succumb to the blandishments of the white middle–
class world. The blues and their successors in the several forms of jazz
are thereby threatened. No less so, however, than the writer-living
in
that same world-who tries to do them justice.
Dan Jacobson clearly felt himself enough threatened by
his
world
to leave it. The longest essay in this fine collection tells of his arrival
in London. His childhood as a South African Jew weighed heavily
upon him. His youth and its choice of loyalty to this past or departure
from it was very much his challenge. The possibilities of his manhood
as a writer, as a person with friends, family, and a place to live cropped
into his mind at almost every turn in the great city of London, a city
movingly appreciated by the young emigre. He comes to it like a cook,
an artist, a musician-savoring it, noticing its bulk and its more subtle
shapes and forms, responding to its light and shadows, hearing its
various sounds.
Jacobson obviously enjoys travel. The book has four parts,
three of which are given the names of countries: England, South
Africa, and Israel. These three nations in their customs and traditions
are closely involved in the writer's life and identity. He writes about
each with a special intimacy, and where there is desolation or agony
